The kerfuffle over Academy Award nominations is Christmas Day for the professional outragetariat.

Looked at objectively: this is a matter of multi-millionaires — of various ethnic and national backgrounds — in verbal combat over nominations for a piece of statuary. A golden sex toy for the beautiful people (as per Gervais). The ego trip of the 1% (as per the Occupyistas).

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Re political kerfuffle across the pond, viewed from afar:

Not all Marxists are/were Communists. Not all Marxists and Communists are/were Stalinists. There’s a world of difference between the Marxist Orthodoxy, the so-called Scientific Socialism which runs from Kautsky to Althusser, and Western Marxism (sometimes called Cultural Marxism), exemplified by Gramsci, Korsch, and the Frankfurt School. The former remained Stalinist long after the strongman’s death. The latter rejected Stalinism when the man of steel was at the height of his power.

When Mr Corbyn (or was it Mr Milne) embarked on his string of slow-moving purges, I commented: “The assumption of the infallibility of Mr Corbyn and his grassroots cadres is the end of democratic politics and the beginning of organised religion.” The course that Labour has taken during Mr Corbyn’s reign is a return to catechistic Marxism of the Orthodox variety. There can be no compromise with the catechism, even if reality contradicts it. Mssrs Corbyn, McDonnell, and Milne would do well to remember Marx’s reflections on the events in France between 1848-1851 which put the thesis of the Communist Manifesto into doubt.

Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.

The dead weight of Stalin and Trotsky is the nightmare on the brains of the Corbynard cadres and haunts Mr Corbyn’s philosophical outlook. It is time for both to wake up from the bad dream and face reality squarely as it is, not as it is supposed to be (as per the catechism of the Marxist Orthodoxy).